Barry Adamson: Know Where To Run

More monochrome musical movies from the Mancunian.

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Manchester’s second most famous post-punk bass maestro returns to his Brighton home studio following a fruitful but temporary reunion with Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds, including a US tour which partly inspired this solo album and its accompanying photo book.

Know Where To Run is vintage Adamson, from Tom Waits-ish film-noir cocktail-jazz monologues like Claw And Wing to the freewheeling, Wurlitzer-waltz roar of Come Away, which shares with Cave a wry line in doomed romanticism.

Some of the retro-crooner murder ballads risk straying into cliché, but there are inspired sound-collage experiments here too, including the sample-heavy analogue progtronica of In Other Worlds and the shape-shifting Texas Crash, a rollicking freight train loaded with funk, gospel and frazzled blues-punk energy.

Stephen Dalton
Stephen Dalton

Stephen Dalton has been writing about all things rock for more than 30 years, starting in the late Eighties at the New Musical Express (RIP) when it was still an annoyingly pompous analogue weekly paper printed on dead trees and sold in actual physical shops. For the last decade or so he has been a regular contributor to Classic Rock magazine. He has also written about music and film for Uncut, Vox, Prog, The Quietus, Electronic Sound, Rolling Stone, The Times, The London Evening Standard, Wallpaper, The Film Verdict, Sight and Sound, The Hollywood Reporter and others, including some even more disreputable publications.